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The missing ingredient

“Old woman, I cannot read your recipe,”
is how I began many a phone call to Granny after I moved away.

“What does it say, old gal?” she would
ask.

“I don’t know. You have the worst
penmanship I have ever seen.”

“Maybe if you had paid attention when I was
making it, you wouldn’t need the recipe,” she commented.

I sighed.

Granny’s idea of baking would probably
drive modern day bakers and chefs crazy.

She didn’t really use measuring cups or
spoons, preferring to eyeball her ingredients, a cardinal sin in baking.

“You are supposed to use exact
measurements,” I told her once.

She gave me a sideways glance and
ignored my comment.

When I married, I wanted to have her
best recipes with me so I could continue some of her traditions, so I asked her
to write them down.

“No.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I said no. I ain’t giving
you my recipes. They mine.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“They mine. I ain’t writing them down. I
ain’t never wrote ‘em down – someone could steal ‘em that way. And I ain’t
about to start either.”

Steal her recipes? Did she not know that
people could find recipes for things practically anywhere? To Granny, her
recipes were sacred and top secret; surely no one else could be trusted with
the power to make a biscuit.

Still, I was shocked. Was she really not
going to share her recipes with me?

Maybe I should have wrote it down when I
was with her, but it never occurred to me that she would not me give a recipe.

I also was a little hurt. Granny had
been the one who taught me how to cook, standing me in a chair beside her or
sitting me on the table as she sifted flour, patted out biscuits, or mixed cake
batter. How could she take away something so precious she and I had always
bonded over?

“One. You can have one,” she announced
one day.

“One what?”

“One recipe of mine. Choose wisely.”

I felt like Indiana Jones being told to
choose the cup that was the Holy Grail in the Last Crusade.

I thought about it for a minute.

“I want your biscuit recipe,” I said.

“What? Are you kidding me? You’ve been
making biscuits with me since you were three; if you don’t know how to make biscuits
20 years later, you don’t need to be in the kitchen. Choose another one.”

“But I can’t remember what you put in
them,” I said earnestly. Everyone raved about her biscuits; I wanted
rave-worthy biscuits, too.

She frowned, partly in disappointment
that I could not remember and partly in the fact she was conceding her own rule
and going to give me two recipes.

“Alright, I will give you the biscuit
one, too, but it is so simple it is ridiculous,” she said. “What else do you
want?”

I thought a little longer. I knew I wouldn’t
be able to handle her coconut cake recipe; that involved too many steps. Things
like pot roast or her golden fried chicken were not at the top of my list
either. I wanted something that when I made it, people proclaimed it tasted
just like Helen’s.

“Your chocolate pound cake recipe,” I declared
brazenly.

She inhaled sharply. “You want me to
write all that down?”

I nodded.

“Alright. I will. But it’s gonna take
some time. I ain’t even got it wrote down; I just do it from memory, something
you should be able to do.”

“That’s the one I want, Granny,” I said.

She nodded. “And that’s the one you will
get.”

A few days later, the smell of the
chocolate pound cake permeated the house and she handed me two index cards, one
smudged with chocolate.

“I had to make one, so I’d know what all
I put in it,” she said. “Don’t you go being like that woman that sold that high-dollar
cookie recipe. You sell my recipes and I will sue you.”

Gleefully, I tucked the cards into my purse
for safe keeping and went to eat the fruits of her labor.

It wasn’t until about a month later,
when I pulled them out that I noticed something was missing. I called her.
“Old woman, this makes no sense.”

“It should make perfect sense.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” I protested. “You only have flour, Crisco, and water or
milk. No measurements.”

“It depends on how many biscuits you
want to make. You should know that part. Now I gotta go, the Wheel is on, but
you call me back if you need to. At 7:30.”

The next day I called her to tell her
the dough did not turn out right.

“You
gotta get your hands in the dough,” Granny said.

“That’s gross,” I protested.

“You want biscuits? You gotta get your hands
in there. Did you ever see me mix dough with a spoon? No, you gotta get your
hands a little dirty if you want to cook.”

It took me a few tries – and several
phone calls and a reminder from Granny about her super top-secret biscuit trick
she omitted off the recipe – but soon, I was a biscuit baking master.

I should have known if she called that
recipe easy her chocolate pound cake one would be a doozy.

Every time I made her cake, it involved staying
on the phone with Granny.

“I couldn’t read a word the woman wrote,”
I told Mama. “And what I could read, I couldn’t understand. She had just ‘cocoa
powder’ or ‘butter’ but didn’t put down how much.”

Mama laughed softly. “Well, Kitten, if
Granny used butter, more than likely it was one of two measurements: the whole
stick or the whole pound. For a cake, go with a pound, just to be safe.

“And her leaving off the actual measurements
was just her way of making you have to call her every time you made it so she
would talk to you.”

“Yeah,” I said, finally understanding
some of the Redhead Prime’s stubbornness.